The Automatic Body with Robin Berzin

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise and mindset with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus I give you tips that you can put into fast action to uplevel your health so you can go out there and live that big life you're meant to live. Now, today's show is all about a super cool concept. It is the concept of the automatic body. I'd never heard about it before. However, I heard about the woman behind it. In fact, I've been hearing about her over the last year. Her name is Dr. Robin Berzin and she is the founder and CEO of Parsley Health. And this is like this medical clinic, it's in New York, in San Francisco and la and I've just been hearing the most amazing stuff about it. Turns out we have a lot of mutual friends so we got hooked up. So let me tell you a little bit about her and then I'm going to share this interview with you. And I don't even know where to start. It's so exciting, this whole concept and then some of the things that she talks about in terms of looking at stress differently, in terms of looking at stress and stimulation. So before I go on, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Robin. She is the founder of Parsley Health and this is a modern high end medical practice that's redefining primary care. She is passionate about this. She is, she is on a roll to disrupt medicine to make it so that this is what we go to. We go to a clinic where they get to the root cause where they do high end, super cool high tech rather testing so they can really find out what's going on and really show the effects of our like high drive and high stimulating, high stress lifestyle and then have some things that can turn it around. She's a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and she attended medical school at Columbia where she co founded the Physician Communication app Curator. She trained in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and is a certified yoga instructor, meditation teacher and has studied Ayurveda. She's written for a number of leading news wellness sites including Mind Bodygreen, Yahoo and HuffPo, and speaks regularly for organizations including the Clinton Foundation, Health 2.0 Summit, evolution of Medicine Summit, and the Functional Forum with my buddy James Maskell. She lives in New York City with her husband and her dog. And she's travels, of course, a bunch, especially between New York, LA and San Francisco. But she's super passionate about being a disruptive force in healthcare, especially merging the new paradigm medicine and the latest technologies. So again, Dr. Robin Berzin. All right, so let's do it. Dr. Robin Berzin, welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here with me today.

So great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, my pleasure. So you've got this crazy term, automatic body. What the heck do you mean by this?

It's a term I'm kind of obsessed with because it's talking about the side of our nervous system and the side of our body that automatically makes us healthy, that we count on every day without realizing that it's there. It's so powerful. And what I'm seeing day to day in my practice at Parsley Health is that people are disrupting and turning off these amazing automatic mechanisms that work to keep them healthy, and that if we restore them, we feel better.

All right, so the obvious question then is, what the heck are we doing to turn them off? We don't want to do that.

Right, we don't want to do that. And so the couple things that we're all doing, all of us, myself included, one, chronic stress and chronic stimulation. You know, I'm not even talking about stress anymore. I'm talking about hyper stimulation, because people are on from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed and it's going, going, going. And technology has resulted not in making our lives easier. No. But in actually meaning that we work all the time and that we're all, when we're not working, we're looking at social media and reading blogs and talking to people. And as a result, we are chronically stimulating our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight run from a lion side of our nervous system. And when that side of our nervous system that run from a lion, life is an emergency. Go, go, go is always on. What's sacrificed or turned off is our parasympathetic, which is our rest, digest, relax, and heal. And that side of our nervous system needs to balance out our fight or flight. And so what's happening is people are always in emergency mode, in fight or flight, and they're never turning on their parasympathetics. And so that is one way that we're turning it off. And we're turning off our automatic body. We're also doing it through food. People are just living on coffee and sugar and carbs. I call it carbage. And those things are chronically hyper stimulating too. And so between media and work and technology and the pace at which we live our lives, between the foods that we're eating and the way that we're not stimulating our parasympathetic or rest side of our nervous system, through behaviors like walking outside or resting or meditating or gentle yoga or things like that, we're effectively shutting down the part of our bodies that are there to help us heal.

And so assuming, like you've just described everybody, right? So unfortunately, me too, I know I'm like waiting, going, okay, what's she going to say? And I know she's going to try to take my coffee away. So what are someone's living like this? Assuming we're all living like this to some degree, what's it look like? What are the results?

So the things that we're seeing are actually really surprising. It's not just, oh, I'm a little tired or maybe I get a headache in the afternoon. It's true imbalances. So what we're seeing is when your cortisol, which is your fight or flight hormone, is always up, that raises your blood sugar, that in turn raises your insulin. So we're seeing blood sugar imbalances, pre diabetes metabolic syndrome, as a result of this, that also impacts your testosterone. Insulin being up raises testosterone and testosterone is turned into estrogen. So now what do we see? We see pcos, polycystic ovarian syndrome. We see pms, we, we see irregular periods. We even see infertility. We see the shutting down of the natural cycle, the woman's menstrual cycle, which we see is going up and up and up and everybody's going and getting ivf. And I'm pregnant now, which is my first child. I'm very excited. But I am taking on this topic of fertility as well in a really big way because I'm seeing how this automatic body being shut down is resulting in so much infertility and that if we fix that, that then we don't necessarily need to get ivf. And that's a really huge, huge deal for some people. We're also seeing insomnia and anxiety and weight gain when your cortisol is up, you gain belly fat, and you gain weight. And so we see people stuck with all of these problems. They're not really going to a doctor to deal with them. But at Parsley, we do a lot of cool testing to show you how these things are happening in your body in real time. And we show people that, hey, this is something you have to take seriously. And it's not just this, oh, I feel stressed, but who cares? I'm going to brush it off and keep moving. We're seeing really profound effects. Blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar, hormones, digestive imbalances, even immune problems, which are skyrocketing in young women in particular. And I think the turning off of our automatic body is at the root of a lot of these problems.

It just makes so much sense. I mean, even when we take infertility, which of course, as we know, is on the rise is, you know, if you're having trouble getting pregnant, maybe there's something in your body that is messed up that needs to be fixed so that you can get pregnant. The answer is in ivf, the answer is fix the underlying cause. So it makes so much sense. And I remember, like, it was like, 10, 15 years ago. I started to see labs coming in with where my clients were eating great, but their blood sugar was up. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? It was like when we just started to look at adrenal stress tests and started to look at stress, and I went, gosh, this is crazy that stress can do this. So it is great. What I'm hearing that I'm the most excited about, because the biggest challenge I see with stress is that it's subjective. You know, we have the couple ways to test, but we really need to be able to show people this is what's happening, because, you know, what you measure, you can improve. So let's jump into what are the things that you're doing that can show people what's happening to them and the impact stress is having on them?

Yeah. So we do a lot of testing at Parsley that your regular doctor won't be doing for 10 years or ever. And we do that kind of cool, I call it fancy pants testing, because we want to show you how your body's functioning today rather than just waiting for it to fall apart and then showing you, well, hey, look at that. It's completely falling apart, which is sort of what conventional medicine does. Waits for the wheels to fall off the wagon. So we don't do that at Parsley, and we look at things like blood sugar, we look at fasting insulin, we look at measures of inflammation, like, and.

I've got to interrupt you for a second so people understand how huge this is. You know, I have been fighting for fasting insulins for years, and I just had another doctor tell me, no, his blood sugar was normal. This was for my son who has a brain injury. So everything's, well, wonky, right? I'm going, his blood sugar wasn't normal. It's elevated. And if his blood sugar is normal and his fasting insulin's up, it's an even bigger issue. So you've got to look at these numbers and they aren't doing it. So this is hugely progressive. So, all right, keep going. It's exciting. Yay.

Yay.

I'm so glad you're excited about it. It's so important that we look at these things and we look at them early. We also look at autoimmune antibodies standardly on every single person.

Oh, that's so big. You know, and that's the other one. Robin, you're making me crazy jumping up and down here because again, I'm going to relay this back to my son. But autoimmune. I've been doing a lot of interviews on autoimmune with people, and what I'm amazed is we'll see the antibodies go up and I'll hear from a doctor. Well, we're going to watch it. I'm like, what? You know, watch it. Do what? You know, don't watch.

Okay, watch and wait for it to fall apart as opposed to intervening early. So that drives me crazy too. And unfortunately, that's what I learned in med school. But through my studies of functional medicine and through our practice of parsley health, we've really developed a system of testing for things like autoimmune antibodies, especially for thyroid. We test for them early and we test for them routinely because often. I had a 35 year old man, no one was ever going to test his thyroid. He was being told he needed antidepressants and that his weight gain and his fatigue and his inflammation were all just in his head and that he should take an antidepressant medication. And we discovered he had Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is an autoimmune thyroid condition which no doctor would have ever tested him for. And the awesome part was that we were able then to look at his lifestyle. He was chronically stressed. He was overworking out and pushing himself and not taking enough downtime. He was eating way too much sugar. Drinking way too much wine, just eating a super inflammatory diet. Things like gluten that can be really inflammatory for the thyroid and through some supplements, some dietary changes and some systematic stress reduction and practices that stimulated the automatic body. He actually not only felt a million times better, got off of all psych meds, but he also, he looks great, I should say, but he also got his antibodies to go away.

That's so great.

We actually were able to reverse it. So we.

Look, you said something super important. I'm going to interrupt again because you just lilted one out there that is so important for people to hear and I will write it back. My brain injured son also just got diagnosed with Hashimoto's. They would have missed it and it was there. And thankfully I've got another doc, Dr. Alan Christensen, who found it.

But.

And I knew because he was gaining weight for no reason and tired and depressed. Right. And what's so important there is the first doctor said he needs to exercise more. And I'm like, no, you know, my first, my first career was as an exercise physiologist. I'm like, no, more is not better here. And I still see this out there with people, if they think that they need to lose weight or whatever, they're going to go out. And I just had another guy tell me this. We were on the way to the airport and he said, yeah, I'm working out with the best trainer in Toronto and I just can't seem to lose weight. And I go, tell me what you're doing. He says, we're working out an hour plus every day at the gym. I said, stop that. So it's so important that you, you mention that because there is still this big thing out here if, you know, you just need to exercise more. And it's like, no, no, you need to, you need to create the stimulus and then recover from it. It's so important for people to get this. And I haven't. You don't hear it very often.

So true. You know, and I've told, I tell so many women in New York who are struggling with weight gain and fatigue and problems with their periods and they are going to spinning class every single day. And I tell them to stop spinning and stop running and start doing yoga and start weight training and all of a sudden, because they've gotten their bodies out of fight or flight mode, then they're able suddenly to resolve a lot of these problems. And it was because of the chronic stress, chronic stimulation. And again, I've been using this word, stimulation, which is also a wonky word only because, as you pointed out, stress becomes this sort of esoteric thing that we all blow off and have accepted as a just general consequence of modern life. But I would say that the consequences are so much bigger and so much higher and are really driving a lot of the chronic symptoms we all experience and illnesses we all experience that it's not even as much about what we perceive as stress because a lot of people have buried that so deeply they don't even feel the stress. But it doesn't mean the stress isn't there and it doesn't mean that it isn't affecting the biological mechanisms of your body every day. And when we get people to recognize that and tap into that and stop pushing themselves so hard, whether it's working out or working, and still listen, I'm all about how to hack life and be as productive as possible. I mean, I'm a physician, I'm a CEO, I'm a soon to be mom, I'm motor. But I can do that if I take time out to correct course correct and stimulate and support my automatic body.

Well, let's talk about that then. That's the beautiful segue into course correcting. One of my favorite things that's in my next book is, you know, you can't course correct standing still. You got to course correct. So what would be some of these hacks? What, you know, the person listening, who knows they're overstimulated and I love that word, that's the person perfect description for it is because we don't recognize that things like, you know, checking your iPhone all day long is just a source of stress. It's overstimulation. So what, what are, what are your, some of your prescriptions to turn this around?

Couple things. First, we look at food really closely. A lot of people are eating a lot more sugar refined carbs than they realize. They're eating a lot of bars and juices and things that have been kind of greenwashed and sold to us as healthy that are really putting their nervous systems and their hormone systems and their cortisol and their insulin and their blood sugar on a total yo yo and it's making them feel like crap. We look at caffeine. You know, I'm a big fan of caffeine. I have a double espresso every morning. I don't think that you have to give it up to have a healthy life. Some people though, are really overdoing it and relying on it and putting themselves again on that yo yo. And then it's about building things into your life every single day. And I really think that we have to set these guidelines and guardrails because if we don't, we end up looking at a screen for 12, 14, 16, 18 hours a day. And so setting rules for yourself three or four nights a week after 7pm I put my phone away, I put my computer away. I don't look at the television screen. I don't become a slave to these pieces of technology which are incredibly helpful and wonderful, but not if overused. And then scheduling. I send myself calendar invites for meditation. I'm not kidding. Google Calendar saves my life. Google Calendar invites to myself for meditation for yoga. And I do a program that includes a regular schedule of a day where I spend an hour meditating, a day where I go to an hour long yoga class, a day where I do 20 minutes of weightlifting, and a day where I do cardio and I rinse and repeat and I make sure that this time is blocked in my calendar calendar so that no matter what I have going on, the social events, the work events, the inevitable calls with somebody, that you could always schedule the thing, the trip, the grocery store, that got in the way, that that is blocked time. And so in that way, I'm just using technology as my friend to say I need to build in time into my regular schedule. That's downtime. And downtime doesn't include watching tv. It could even include things like cooking or going for a long walk with your dogs and leaving your phone at home. But deliberately building in these tactics into your schedule I find is really effective for people because they tell me all the time, you know, I built that hour a day into my schedule of that turn off time that wasn't pushing myself to the brink of exhaustion in a workout class or looking at, you know, my social media feed until 2 in the morning. And everything changed. And so I think just recognizing that we have that power around food and around some of these lifestyle habits is really powerful. And then at parsley, of course, we go deeper than that and we do a really personalized program of testing. We use professional grade supplements to help course correct. So sometimes people need more support for their bodies than even diet and lifestyle change can do. We even prescribe medications. If you have a really severe thyroid problem, we'll prescribe you a hormone. If you have a really horrible infection, we will treat that infection with an antibiotic. Because it's 2016, we don't need to reiki these things away. I believe we, you know, I believe we should use the best of modern medicine, diagnostics, cutting edge stuff, medications where necessary. And also recognize that most people don't need medicine. Most people need to look at diet, lifestyle, movement. And if they change those things, they restore these natural processes. Think about all the things that you do all day that you don't think about. Breathing, your heart beating, your digestion working. We are these beautiful complex organisms and some of us, myself included, get so stuck in the front of our brains and we ignore our bodies and then our bodies start to shut down on us. They just start asking for a little love.

Well, what I love here is that you, when I asked you that question of how what you prescribe to fix it, you started with how you do it yourself. And I'm betting that that's part of why Parsley Health has gotten to be such a phenom. And everyone's buzzing about it. Now you're in New York, LA and San Francisco. It's because it started with you doing it yourself because it's very hard to tell a patient what to do if you don't own it and do it yourself. So I just, I super appreciate that with you. And for everyone listening, what's the best website to learn more about what you're doing?

Parsleyhealth.com gives you all the information you need.

Awesome. Thank you so much. So thank you Robin, for joining me today. And again, everyone listening, you can go to parsleyhealth.com they're now centers in New York, LA and San Francisco. And after the break, I'm going to be answering listeners questions. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question is awesome. It comes from from Gordy. And Gordy writes in JJ, I'm trying to lose 30 pounds. And so I've been following your program the Virgin Diet and I've been going to the gym where I'm working out an hour every single day, but the weight is not budging. It seemed I seemed to be losing weight before I went to the gym. And now that I've gone to the gym, it's just a stand till. What the heck is going on? Well, we brought this up during the interview, and it's kind of interesting because my whole world, I started out as an exercise physiologist, and early on we were told that if someone wanted to lose weight, they needed to eat less, exercise more. You've all heard that, and you've all known that this doesn't work. So what you heard today from Robin is that we have to watch how much stimulation versus restoration that we have. And so in both the Virgin diet and the Sugar Impact diet, and especially in the online programs, I go through a formula for exercise that's going to help you have great, steady, sustained energy, move your body into a mode of burning fat rather than storing it and holding onto and building muscle. And that's really the key to exercise. And so here's what I want you to think of here. We should be moving more. Walking the dog, taking the stairs, just moving more throughout life. But it doesn't count as exercise unless you get hot, sweaty, and it hurts a bit. So the trackers are great because ideally we are walking an hour a day. But, you know, unless you're tracking it, what you measure, you can improve. You're probably not moving that much because we've got sedentary lifestyles. So any opportunity you have, don't take the car, you know, don't take the elevator, don't take the escalator. And this is honestly why a dog, Another reason why a doggie is such a great idea, because both they can lower stress hormones, and second, they'll make you move more. When they look at you with those little eyes, you're like, okay, I'll take you out. Um, but beyond that, there's other key things that you want to do. Number one, you want to make sure with. With exercise. And it's like if you don't use it, you'll lose it. You want to make sure that you're building muscle. So resistance training is key. And that should be a couple of times a week with a rest break of at least a day in between of the major muscle groups. And again, I go through this in depth, especially in my online programs for Sugar Impact Diet and virgin Diet. Then you also want to do some cardio burst training. Now, I don't do any endurance, steady state, long training like going out for an hour run or bike ride. I'm doing easy walking, easy bike riding, that kind of stuff. But then I do all out burst training two to three times a week. And again, I've discussed this in my blogs and other podcasts and it's in my program. So you want to do some cardio burst training where you go all out for for 30, 60 seconds, actively recover for twice as long and do that again to accumulate four more minutes of total bursting and then do some calming exercise, some restorative exercise like calming yoga or calming stretching. And that's again, that's more. I put that into the mindful meditation part of things. This is not hot yoga, power yoga. This is easy yoga for you. That's very restorative. That's the formula. That's the formula of intensity, stimulation and recover restoration. The recovery, the relaxation is just as important, if not more important than the intensity. So it's all in that formula and it's super important. And don't overdo it. If you overdo your exercise, you can be hungrier. You're going to raise stress hormones, you're going to lose muscle mass and you'll actually make your body better at storing fat, not burning it. Ah, that's the last thing you want to do now. If you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com ask and you can leave a voicemail for me. I love hearing from you. Plus one more way I'd love to hear from you. I would hugely appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. That's not just one friend, that's many friends. This is JD Virgin signing off and reminding you to live courageously.

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